Henry & Pete



These are some of Sarah’s cousins. We don’t get to see these guys very much, but on our trip to the U.S. last month, we did a three-car caravan road trip down to Oklahoma City from Kansas City for a wedding in another branch of the family. We have pictures of them as near-babies on our family picture shelf in our apartment and I still think of them as being that size.

I was hoping to get my photographic tech nerd on and do something nice for my wife’s family simultaneously at the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding, but the flash sync to the camera wasn’t working correctly. I have an external flash made by the Metz company (and a mounting bracket) for my Olympus E-500 and for whatever reason, the camera’s shutter speeds were way longer than necessary with the flash, which washed (almost) all the images out. The flash also appeared to fire at random intervals, even without pressing the shutter button.

These images were pretty much the only two I managed to salvage (applying a little saturation adjustment and red-eye reduction thanks to UFRaw and the GIMP). I think I resolved the problem of the flash and camera synchronizing improperly only by making sure to do these steps in the following order:

1. With both devices off, connect everything.
2. Turn on the camera.
3. Turn on flash.

Then it seemed to work normally. Unfortunately I figured that out too late. Incidentally, the instructions specify that you shouldn’t connect/disconnect the flash and camera while either one (or both) of them is switched on, but they don’t say the camera should start up first.